BMC AMI Ops Reviews

My main use case for BMC AMI Ops is for monitoring and small adjustments in the mainframe environment, where I use the tool to monitor the status and health, the depth of MQ queues, and to enable and disable transactions in CICS, among other things. I have created several screens and views that are very interesting and important for monitoring the health of the mainframe environment as a whole.

The best features that BMC AMI Ops offers, in my opinion, are the ability to issue commands in several CICS at the same time and the ability to create views and screens that reflect the performance and general state of the systems and their applications in the environment as a whole. When I have a Sysplex with several CICS, sometimes dozens of CICS, and I need to stop a transaction or start a connection, through BMC AMI Ops I can do this with a single command on one screen, instead of opening CICS by CICS to issue the command inside each one. Issuing commands on several systems at the same time makes day-to-day work much easier because it saves many minutes every time I have to issue a command in more than one CICS at the same time.

BMC AMI Ops has had a positive impact on my organization because the ability to create views and screens, where I bring together applications and their functions on a single screen, makes monitoring and spotting possible problems that are happening much easier. Thus, my response is much faster and more proactive. By looking at the screens and views, I get a real-time notion of whether a queue is filling up too quickly in MQ or if there are transactions in a CICS that should be active but are not, all of which is reflected in the user experience. If the application is down for a long time, the user is impacted.

Regarding BMC AMI Ops, I appreciate the way it is today; since I am a mainframe professional, I appreciate its style and layout. However, I understand that newer generations might prefer a layout more similar to a web page in appearance. I think the only thing I would like to add is that new users may feel intimidated by the black MainView screen on the mainframe. If it were possible to have a more user-friendly and more up-to-date layout, perhaps people would find it easier to accept using BMC AMI Ops.

I give it a nine because the tool is very complete and very good, but I think it could be a bit more explanatory when I need to create new views and screens; there is some documentation missing. I have documentation, but it is in a language that is not very intuitive.

I have been using BMC AMI Ops for six years.

BMC AMI Ops is quite stable.

The scalability of BMC AMI Ops is not an area I am involved in, but I hear from the people who are involved that it has good scalability.

Regarding BMC AMI Ops customer support, this is also not an area I get involved in; this part usually stays with my support team.

When I joined this company, BMC was already installed, but I know that before they used Omegamon.

BMC AMI Ops is deployed locally in my organization.

I have not used the built-in automation and OpenTelemetry features in BMC AMI Ops yet, as that part is handled by another part of my team.

I have not obtained data on return on investment since, as a member of the production team, I do not have data on values and finances; however, I believe that using BMC AMI Ops makes day-to-day production much easier.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is not an area I am part of.

I do use the observability and early detection features with AIOps in BMC AMI Ops, and this is the main reason I use BMC AMI Ops in my environment. Through the views and screens I create, I monitor various system elements on a single screen. It is possible to create thresholds and other alarms when parameters are not within what is acceptable for production, making it very easy to identify and try to act on the root of that problem.

Regarding cost and capacity visibility, this is not an area where I, as a production analyst, have access to the cost issue. However, I believe that BMC AMI Ops has proven to be interesting, so much so that the company has continued using it for many years.

My advice to others who are thinking about using BMC AMI Ops is that it is worth investing in BMC AMI Ops; it is a complete, good tool, not difficult to configure and use, and it helps a lot. I have given this review a rating of nine out of ten.

BMC AMI Ops offers excellent features including the monitoring dashboard and alerts, which I appreciate even though I only used them at a basic level.

BMC AMI Ops positively impacted my organization during the evaluation phase. The main benefit was improved visibility into the mainframe environment, providing a clear view of alerts and system status.

My experience with BMC AMI Ops was limited, but during this evaluation, I believe it could be improved by making some features easier for new users to understand, probably with better guidance or more practical examples.

I was not directly involved in the deployment process of BMC AMI Ops, so I don't have enough details about the architecture.

I rate BMC AMI Ops an eight out of ten.

I choose eight because I used it for a limited time and found it to be a useful tool, but I don't give a higher score because my experience was very limited.

Regarding BMC AMI Ops's AI capabilities, I don't have enough experience with detailed assessment because my usage was mainly focused on basic monitoring, so I cannot provide more information about the security aspect in depth. I didn't use the AI capability actively, so I cannot provide a deep evaluation based on my monitoring experience.

I can only assess the unified operations experience provided by BMC AMI Ops in terms of system health visibility across mainframe systems and subsystems at a basic level, as my experience was limited. I only found improved visibility into system health for basic monitoring of the system.

I am not using the observability and AIOps-driven early detection feature in BMC AMI Ops. I have not used the integrated monitoring, automation, and open telemetry features in BMC AMI Ops.

BMC AMI Ops has not helped in improving mean time to detection (MTTD), and I don't have any information or example to share.

My advice to others looking into using BMC AMI Ops is to evaluate it based on operational needs and to test it in your own environment, as it can be useful for improving monitoring and visibility. My overall rating for this product is eight out of ten.

We use TM-AE for batch job management. Not only does it help enforce some of our standards, but allows us to control where certain jobs run based on licensed software. The service level and automated capacity manager functions allow us to control priorities, support SLA's and manage our 4HRA and reduce MLC for some software bills.

Software access control (SAC) limits systems where some of our products are not licensed. Again, the automated capacity manager helps manage our workload and reduce priorities of discretionary work so the critical path batch jobs are completed within the policy defined at our site.

Job binding services (JBS) is used by SAC, but also helps with our datas sharing environments. Any job can have multiple affinities (like SCHENV on steroids) associated to allow the job to run in a JESMAS and find all of the resources on a particular LPAR to satisfy requirements.

Our scheduler managed batch has standard checking prior to promotion. Enforcement of JCL standards for end user desktop submitted jobs has been very positive. We change processes (especially SYSOUT classes) based on standards to manage output.

There currently is a WUI that allows an operator a single pane of glass to see how TM is performing to meet service policies within a JESMAS environment. This is a new feature and multiple individuals have expressed desire to not only see real time monitoring, but the ability to historically go back at least several hours or possibly an entire day to review history.

There have been little or no issues with the software as delivered.  We maintain the ability to run directly under WLM without TM if needed, but manage ALL batch via TM to make sure we receive maximum value from the tool.

TM can run on a single member or multiple member JESMAS configuration.

All cases are responded to in a timely manner.  The always provide valuable feedback or immediate solutions to an issue.

No, prior to data sharing and other initiatives we exploited a single affinity SCHENV and only scheduled batch processing was managed for standards.

Installed product in couple of hours.  The time has been spent creating and modifying policies along with the job action language coded to exploit functions. 

The vendor team met with us weekly to make sure we had the resources and answers to make our install successful.

Batch smoothing our 4HRA and implementation of group capacity profiles has allowed us to run sub-capacity and lower our MLC.  

The TM team was very helpful getting us started.  They provided a detailed project plan as a guide to successful implementation.  Installing the software is very easy, but the time is spent building you policies for service levels, capacity management and action code language used to tie all of the components together.

No

MainView is used as a central point of view to control and monitor systems on the mainframe like z/OS, CICS, MQSeries IMS, or DB2. 

MainView has enabled me, in the past, to solve production problems faster, or even avoid them preemptively with warnings.

The integration of IMS commands is very useful, because you do not have to switch to another tool to problem solve solutions.

More visualisation and support for mobile devices would be good. An expansion for distributed systems would be great, but probably not workable.

We did use IBM OMEGAMON, but switched to BMC MainView, because it is easier to use, more flexible, and it also came in a software package.

If you already use other products from BMC, you might be able to get a package deal from BMC's sales department.

Yes, we had IBM OMEGAMON, but decided against continuing to use it, because BMC MainView was more valuable.